First of all, I don’t understand why indigo and violet are split… why not just call it purple? Ok, not my question.
Colors of the rainbow all make sense to me except purple.
Red – orange – yellow…makes sense that orange is between red and yellow, and it’s the combination of those two primary colors, nice transition
This follows with green, blue. Green is between yellow and blue.
Now… if purple aka indigo and violet are a combination of blue and red, how can it be on the opposite end of red (very different frequency) and outside the frequency range of blue? I would expect a secondary color’s frequency to be between the two primary colors that create it
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> First of all, I don’t understand why indigo and violet are split
When the ROY G BIV acronym was first used, “blue” meant something closer to “cyan”, and “indigo” really meant “blue”.
As for your main question, red yellow and blue are *not* the so-called “primary colours”. Depending on what you mean, primary colours are *either* red green blue (RGB) or cyan yellow magenta (CMY). These primary colours have to do with how our eyes actually see colour and how coloured light can be combined to create other colours.
RGB are the “additive” primary colours, which you can sort of think of as being the true primary colours. These are important when you’re producing light, like in computer monitors. Your eyes have three types of light detecting cells, each of which is more sensitive to one of those three colours. Red light will excite your red cone cells much more than your green or blue cone cells, etc. Combining any two of these colours creates a colour from the CMY set. For example, combining red light with blue light will appear magenta. Combining green light with blue light with appear cyan.
CMY are the “subtractive” primary colours, which are important when you’re combining pigments (e.g. mixing paint). These are the real primary colours that you should think of when you think of physically mixing colours together. What’s happening is this: A pigment having light shone on it absorbs some of that light and then reflects the rest back to your eyes, which is what you see. A cyan pigment *removes red light* and reflects back to your eyes a mixture of blue and green. A yellow pigment *removes blue light* and reflects back green and red. If you combine yellow with cyan, you combine their absorption, so the mixed pigment will absorb both red and blue, leaving you with green.
“Purple” can either refer to something close to magenta, which is not one frequency of light but is just how your eyes interpret both red and blue together, or it can be something closer to the deep violet in the rainbow, which is a very high frequency of visible light.
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